Henry eager to make her mark at debut World Rowing Championships

Rower Lauren Henry is counting on bringing her recent record-breaking form into her first Rowing World Championships next week.

Henry and Olympian Hannah Scott will be joined by Lola Anderson and Georgie Brayshaw in the women’s quadruple sculls in Belgrade, where both gold medals and Olympic quota spots are up for grabs.

The 21-year-old and the rest of the British crew set a new national record on their way to World Cup silver in Varese back in June, giving them bucketloads of belief ahead of action in the Serbian capital.

Henry said: “It gave us a lot of confidence. It was actually quite funny, I came in one morning and was like ‘guys, I think we can break the British record.’ This was two weeks before Varese and everyone was like ‘Lauren, it’s 7am on Monday!’

“We did the final and I was just so pleased with how close we got to the Chinese, but I knew I wanted to see the time as I felt we went quite quickly.

“That’s given us a lot of confidence to think that we’ve had two weeks together and we produced the fastest time ever by a British quad – I think it was fourth or fifth on the all-time list.

“Afterwards it was a case of what we could do if we had a more solid block together.”

Scott added: “Lauren’s definitely the analytical one on our boat, so being quite honest, obviously the records are there, but having Lauren telling us where we are and then having that idea of ‘okay, we could be going for records here’ this season has also been exciting.

“We’ve got a combination going at the minute and start to look at those exciting records that we can try to break, or now even break our own.”

A medal is a realistic possibility for the quartet in Belgrade, particularly after a successful build-up to the Worlds.

“I think we’ve had a few crew changes throughout the year with injury and illness, to get that time together the last five weeks has been crucial for us to find more speed, which has been really exciting” commented Scott.

“I think it’s just nice now to put the work we’ve done into show and just see how it goes. We’ve done enough training and we’re just ready to see what happens now.

“Ideally we’d like to be in the position where we produce our best race which for us, we hope would be near or at the top.”

Henry added: “It’s my first senior World Championships so it’s really exciting. We’re in a really good place as a crew, so I’m looking forward to getting out there and racing.

“We have consistently been in the medals this year, so we obviously want to stay within the medals. We know that if we get it right and produce our best race, we’ll be pretty near the top of the field.

“Equally we’ve got to get out there, and just go through our processes. We can’t think about the outcome until we finish our last race.”

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